Friday, November 18, 2011

Gerhard Richter exhibit

Went to the Tate Modern on the weekend in London, and I have to say it was marvelous.

I went to another Richter exhibit at the National Portrait gallery back in 2009 with Nomad, and I was left a little cold. There is no doubt that he is an absolutely masterful painter; however the majority of his work in that exhibit was figurative and honestly left me rather cold. Some of the work was in and of itself quite cold and deliberately so.

Then I discovered that he does abstracts, and he does abstracts that I LOVE....LOVE LOVE LOVE.......

So when I found out about this exhibit I was quite excited and we went and it was marvelous.

My favourites of his works are the 'squeegy paintings' where he uses large reenforced sheets of plexiglass to apply gobs of paints in layers over the works, many of which are enormous....and beautiful.

We weren't allowed to take photos in main exhibition, but the Tate Modern has a series of 6 large paintings called the Cage series, after John Cage the composer who Richter was listening to as he worked on them and these were on display in a separate section that allowed photography without a flash.

Stunning.

A detail:

Some more detail:

and more:

Oh, it would be lovely to have the money to splash that much paint around.

Look at the layers and intricacy.....that's all over the painting. What a treat.

A couple of random people in the gallery to give you some idea of the size of these things.

The latest

Who???

A Canadian sailor aground in Catalonia, Spain. We used to live in Toronto, then we got on our boat and sailed down to the Bahamas where we spent most of our time for three years and now we are here in Spain, outside of Barcelona, learning the languages, eating and doing our thing.
Yup, we still miss the boat but life is good.